Progenika, the company for personalised medicine, has launched two new tools for blood group typing based on cutting-edge technologies. These new developments will avoid diseases and complications in newborns, pregnant women and people needing multiple blood transfusions such as cancer patients.

Such developments help to avoid newborn diseases like neonatal thrombocytopenia, hemolytic disease or foetal anemia. Moreover, they help to avoid alloimmunisation during pregnancy, i.e., the generation and transfer of maternal antibodies to the foetus which derives in foetal blood cell destruction. In addition, these techniques can avoid adverse reactions in patients requiring multiple blood transfusions. It should be highlighted that for many tested blood groups there is no current alternative technique.

The new tools developed by the Basque company are based on Luminex technology, a very fast technique that just takes 5 hours from DNA extraction to the delivery of results. Consequently, a high number of samples can be tested in the same process, which implies resources and cost optimisation. On the other hand, this technique is particularly adapted to blood banks' needs, so they do not have to invest or modify their performance processes. This new technology, together with the already available DNAchips, makes Progenika an international benchmark for the development of molecular diagnosis tools for transfusional medicine.

The so-called IDHPA and Idcore new tools were launched by the end of June in the International Congress of the ISBT - International Society for Blood Transfusion - held in Berlin. Both techniques, comprised within the BLOODchipID family and, consequently, holding the EC quality label that implies the approval by the European Union and marketing authorisation, are included in the distribution agreement recently signed between Grifols y Progenika.